From all of us at OSNews, we wish our readers a happy and prosperous 2003. 2002 was a great year for OSNews. We saw steady growth in readership, a huge effort by Eugenia to make the site better, and constant support and submissions by OSNews readers that kept the wheels turning. The bad economy didn’t seem to dampen the action in the OS Arena, and may have even given Linux a boost as people look for more economical solutions. We hope that the world’s economy improves, that the technophiles who read OSNews have and keep good jobs, and that ad rates go up. 2003 will probably see the launch of a sister site to OSNews. Please post with any ideas you have on a tech-oriented topic that’s under-covered, and we may launch a site to cover it!
Several readers of OSNews seem to get all worked up whenever there is an article about a software tool or library. Personally, I like those articles and think there aren’t enough of them. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to separate the OS news from news regarding the building blocks that make an OS great.
I think it would be nice to have a place like OSNews where I could go to read reviews, updates, and articles on development products (like Zope, Apache, OpenACS, etc.), development platforms (like Java – the platform, Mono, etc.), database technologies (like MySQL, PostreSQL, etc.), and languages (like C, C++, Java – the language, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc.)
I agree. There needs to be a way to filter out certain kinds of news stories … so all these people who are bitching about what gets posted here can have OSNews the way they want it.
Create an extra link to a like ‘news categories’ table, so when you post a news artice it corresponds to a certain section.
Then you could use this so people could possibly restrict what they want to see (this is sounding very slashdot), maybe chuck in a few subdomains (virtual: just do a php request check on each view) linux.osnews.com, mac.osnews.com, all this just being a subset of the content on osnews.com
My AU 2c.
Retro computing at its finest. But what sort of OS can it run?
Just my best wishes for the OSNews- people and all iets readers.
May 2003 see a lot of soft- and hardware improvements ( and improvements of Linux ! )
My best wishes !
…a little column on the front of OSNews that is dedicated to any site updates on alternative operating systems eg openbeos, syllable etc, so that I don’t have to keep checking their individual homepages for updates.
From the talks about seaparate categories, I agree that it would be nice for us to have, but maintaining it might be a problem. Or of course, we could try installing the SlashCode (slashdot’s main news section, then categorized into separate sections: bsd, apple, apache, books, …) we would have reviews, updates, products, etc. yes indeed Grant, sounds very much like slashdot. other possiblities: phpnuke, postnuke, etc. By the way, best wishes for a happy new year!
harDware news and reviews ?
I Suggested some time ago a section detailing general info, branch and history about each important and alive OS, its evolution and subdivision, main sucess forks and new attemps to maintain it alive. For Older OS or Little OS’s an explanation is enought. (Something like this (But Formal): http://pub72.ezboard.com/fosprojectsfrm3.showMessage?topicID=1.topi… , or http://www.theosfiles.com/index.htm (This only has OS’s for X86 platform, there is no Solaris, PPC, Atari, NewOS, Etc.))
OSNews is a OS site, Newbies on OS usually doesn’t have idea what is an OS, what differences and advantage one over other. Terms like Multithreading, Posix, SMP, Protected memory, Distro, etc. All used to difference them as advantages.
Know about each OS going at its OS website may result confusing and hard and there are not comparision patern and not every site has a clear history about evolution of each OS and there isn’t standarized info about them.
I would like see it here, All OS search point here, if I were student I would love see this info in only some place and organized, complete and when new article arrive have a lookup place to understand what’s talking about.
Happy new year, everyone! 2002 was good, 2003 will be much better! And I hope nobody got too drunk
Nice work OS News, and happy new year! May it be better in every way for you.
I haven’t seen Eugenia’s byline in quite awhile, is she on vacation? Retired? Tired?
PLEASE dont go Slashcode… its just so much harder to read and reply to comments than in this straight-up, working system you already have
*SOME* level of customization would be nice though. I propose the following system:
http://www.osnews.com – for absolutely everything, more software than right now and more misc news.
topicname.osnews.com – for anything specific, so we could have linux.osnews.com or bsd.osnews.com and so on. And we need a wireless topic
Would be nice if you could save some preferences into a cookie. Like how many posts you want to see per comment page and so on.
I know that OSNews is working fine without it, but I think that it would be nice to have a login feature. I would suggest keeping the current system of letting anybody type any name and e-mail address, but I believe that a login system would help alleviate some problems. The first would be customization: some people like certain topics, some people won’t shut up about them. I think more importantly that OSNews should adopt some sort of threading. I like how it works on Slashdot, and I believe that it would work well on OSNews. However, I like the simplicity of the site, and if you could find a way to implement threading and real accouts without intruding on simplicity, it would be great. Oh yeah, and for the poster who didn’t know: Eugina retired from running OSNews herself, however she still posts quite often (more often than her goodbye message made it seem that she would).
For Gods sake don’t install slashcode, PHPNuke, etc… They are all horrible bloated POS. I cringe every time I see a site running those. Download the source of them and have a look. You’ll never be the same again.
If you would like some help with maybe the possible extending of your current system, I’d be more than happy to contribute code in my spare time, I’m a very experienced PHP programmer (Including DB design/development/usage) so it’ll be easy, what Elver said (in ‘Customization’) sounds on track too. I’ve done a lot of systems with similar functionality, so no big need to re-invent the wheel.
Doing away with these would be cool.
Use Opera. 😉
I remember reading a comment from Eugenia that the pop-ups should only appear 1 time when your are browsing the site, but shortly after that, they come with every page.
Other than that, I would not have known about a lot of different OS efforts, and I have tried many of them because of osnews.
Thanks for all the great information.
I think some form of threading would be nice. Not a slashdot from though. Thats just horrible. The nicest style I ever saw was the old Benews forum. It had threading and was nice and clean. I miss it so.
Just basic threading were a reply put it under the message one replied to. Keaps things easy to follow.
I don’t think log-ins are good, they just get anoying, especially if you jump from computer to computer. Also any customizing just seams silly. I don’t see what one would want to do. Such things would just ruine the simpleness. If you want to filter stories you don’t like, just scroll past it really fast.
The main thing I’d like to be able to change is how many comments you get in one page of comments. This wouldn’t be that difficult to add to the current system–it already is using cookies to save your name and email address, so it could use a cookie to store whether you’ve clicked the “single page” and keep it as a default.
I’d also personally like to see the HTML parser modified to recognise the <em> and <strong> tags, although that’s probably just a quirk on my part….
I would like one site dedicate totally to software. Meaning hardly any hardware news. The sister site dedicate to hardware news. Meaning something that can compete with the likes of Anandtech or maybe Tom’s :-).
But I would suggest you guys hold it off for this year until Eugenia Version 2.0 is released. Look at the amount of stories you guys manage to get out of the door since she left….
I really like coming here. But only because of the people that are here. But posting here is a pain in the ass (sorry for being so frank) compared to other sites. That’s the reason why I only comment on stories and not in the forums. How about a switch to phpbb?
And how about a complete do-over in the sites looks. I think the current site is rather dull because it has change relatively little in the course of a few years. I’m for a nice look, but I highly suggest following Google’s example and severely limit graphics and eye candy. Google manage to make it the barest minimum but still looks nice.
>but I highly suggest following Google’s example and severely limit graphics and eye candy.
OSNews is already having fast graphics and optimized loading times (a bit worst from its first version since we had to add pricegrabber though)
As for slashcode; I don;t see a reason to switch to it; I didn:t spent 1 day in the hospital for nothing
OSNews is already having fast graphics and optimized loading times (a bit worst from its first version since we had to add pricegrabber though)
As fast as it may be, focusing too much on style really make the page goes dull after awhile. I use Google all the time, far more than I use any site. And I never get bored with the looks of that site.
What I mean is to get rid of unnessecary graphics, like the “Wear OSNews” banner” or the Search button or that gradient bar on the links etc.
Which reminds me, why not move the links up so horizontal viewing space would increase. Just a suggestion….
As for slashcode; I don;t see a reason to switch to it; I didn:t spent 1 day in the hospital for nothing
LOL. I also highly suggest against Slashcode. phpbb is quite nice, but add some modifications in it :-). Or create something custom… if anyone has the time of course.